Many industries produce complex systems that have long service lives and thus must be continually monitored and engineered in order to meet, for example, evolving demands of the application as well as safety and maintenance concerns. Such systems may include, for example, aircraft, rail systems, medical systems, weapon systems, certain foods and drugs, and power generation plants where the continued support of the manufacturer and/or other originating entity is not only required for the upkeep of the systems, but possibly also to abide by state, federal, and/or international regulations administered by one or more corresponding agencies or to fulfill the terms of a military contract.
Such a situation is present with, for example, commercial aircraft sold by a manufacturer thereof to an airline which uses the aircraft as a part of its fleet. These aircraft such as, for example, the Models 707, 717, 727, 747, 757, 767, MD-11, MD-80, etc. produced by The Boeing Company are extremely complex and expensive systems that face stringent scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in areas related to, for instance, safety and maintenance. However, these aircraft may sometimes experience problems that are neither safety-related nor maintenance-related and thus are not covered by a specific procedure or set of guidelines. Such “non-safety” problems may include, for example, literature pockets experiencing yellowing and/or hazing and broken air diffusers in the lower cargo compartment. These non-safety problems require remedies, nonetheless, particularly when the problem is recurrent.
Typically, when non-safety problems occur in the aircraft, for example, the broken air diffuser, a replacement part is obtained from the manufacturer at a certain cost. If the same part continues to experience failure, a permanent remedy from the manufacturer may be requested. However, such remedies are often requested by a subordinate at a particular airline, rather than by senior management, and such requests may be submitted by the subordinate after varying numbers of incidences. In addition, the problem may not be experienced or regarded as a problem by other airlines. Thus, there is generally no consistent reference as to what constitutes an economic or otherwise significant problem that requires the attention of the manufacturer and the airlines having that model of aircraft in their fleet. Further, when a permanent remedy request is accepted by the manufacturer, the manufacturer often conducts an investigation into the root cause of the problem, rather than just the reported problem itself. Accordingly, a permanent remedy to the reported problem may sometimes encompass a much broader scope to address the root cause as well as associated problems arising therefrom.
Following the action by the manufacturer, the airlines are notified of the remedy through a service bulletin and the remedy is made available at a specified cost, which may include the cost of the investigation and the resources dedicated to determining the remedy. However, the permanent remedy may not be economically justifiable for an airline at the cost cited by the manufacturer. Therefore, an airline may simply choose to ignore the corresponding service bulletin for a variety of reasons and may be justified in doing so since the remedy is not mandated under either safety or maintenance requirements. As such, the permanent remedy may only be implemented by a few airlines having the corresponding aircraft as part of its fleet, if the remedy is implemented at all.
If the recommended remedy is not implemented by the airlines, the manufacturer realizes a loss in the manpower, time, and other resources that were dedicated to resolving the reported problem. In addition and as a consequence, the time required for the manufacturer to address other reported problems may be prolonged, which may lead to dissatisfaction among the airlines as to the responsiveness of the manufacturer. Further, airline dissatisfaction may also result if the manufacturer provides a remedy addressing the root cause of the problem, but which strays too far from directly addressing and which carries a disproportionate cost with respect to the reported problem. In such instances, the manufacturer may be seen as failing to understand the extent of the problem that actually needed to be resolved and the actual concern of the airline regarding the reported problem.
In some instances, individual airlines implement their own remedies for non-safety related problems. In other instances, individual airlines may work with a specific supplier or work within a predefined group such as, for example a “Working Together Team” comprising airline representative and propulsion systems representatives, to resolve a problem. However, the remedies resulting from these processes may be unknown to other airlines experiencing the same problem and may result in unnecessary costs and delays for the manufacturer as well as the other airlines if the problem is addressed anew. In addition, the “problem” reported by an airline may, in actuality, be a request for modification to an existing subsystem for which design and development resources are needed instead of problem-solving capacity.
Such concerns may be experienced by a number of diverse industries, and possibly within a particular industry, where a complex system is involved. Thus there exists a need for a system capable of identifying the customer-reported problems comprising the prevalent concerns of the customers and for which the customers would be most likely to implement a provided remedy. It would also be desirable for the system to be capable of prioritizing the reported problems such that the more urgent issues may be addressed first without unnecessary delay in addressing other less urgent issues. In such instances, it may also be desirable for the scope of the problem, the expected cost of a remedy, and/or the implementation schedule for a remedy to be decided prior to the expending of resources in order to increase the likelihood of customer implementation of the remedy. Further, in determining a resolution to the problem, it would be desirable for the system to be able to account for knowledge of remedies to similar problems developed by other customers and/or remedies to similar problems developed by other customers in conjunction with suppliers and/or vendors. Such a system should also account for a customer's request to implement a modification to the product that requires the allocation of alternate resources of the manufacturer in order to address such a request.